A POSTMODERNIST STUDY OF ENVIRONMENTAL CONVERSION FROM NATURAL TO TECHNOLOGICAL IN NEUROMANCER THROUGH THE LENS OF ECOCIDE

Abstract

The natural order has also been grossly violated by rapid urbanisation and technological advancement, leadingto ecological destruction on an international scale. The effects of climate change, habitat destruction, and environmental degradationcontinue to threatenboth human and non-human life. The increase in publicity about ecological crises has, at least,reinstated the broken harmony between nature and humanity. This crisis is frequently manifested in postmodern literature as the gradualsubstitution of the natural world with technological systems and artificial environments. Modern cities, filled with steel-and-glass buildings, highways, signal towers, and expansive infrastructure, are becoming a symbol of the artificial, fragmented, and increasingly alienated. One of the iconic cyberpunk novels, Neuromancer by William Gibson (1984), provides an eloquent depiction of this state. The reality and the artifice, the nature and the simulation, the reality and the simulation, the world in the novel portrays aworld where the boundary between them is radically misbalanced. This paper suggests that Neuromancer introduces the idea of ecocide not on the destruction of the environment, but on a postmodern state of nature being replaced by technological simulacra. It takes a postmodern approach informed by ecocide to analyse how Gibson, in his novel, visualises ecological collapse, synthetic environments, and the disintegration of human experience. It also highlights the importance of cyberpunk as a postmodern literary genre that reflectsthe environmental and technological fears of modern society.